Meta

Category: Classic REbirth

As most of you following on Twitter already know, I’m updating the RE1 version of Classic REbirth with all those features that were supposed to kick in. Hit on that jump button to read the whole thing!

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? At this point Classic REbirth has become quite a huge project of mine and it takes large amounts of time to develop and maintain. With my recent switch to a new job my chances of working on this, or even branching into other classic games (i.e. Resident Evil 3, Dino Crisis … Read more Classic REbirth opens on Patreon

Upcoming in version 1.1.0 Frame rate limiter code rewritten from scratch. No more visual bursts, inconsistent fps, or funny footstep sound glitches across camera changes. Dropped NEWEUR support. The new DLL works exclusively with the Mediakite release as it’s the most updated and provides some important hotfixes. While Mediakite is a Japanese print of the … Read more RE1 Classic REbirth change log

DOWNLOADS

WHAT’S CLASSIC REBIRTH?

Classic REbirth is the label given to my PC patches for Resident Evil / Biohazard, currently supporting the first two games.

HOW TO USE THIS

You will need either the Japanese version 1.01 (MediaKite reprint) or the European version 1.00c for this to work (the European exe is compatible with USA and ASIA versions). If you have an unsupported or unknown version of the game, you will get a message prompt to inform you that no patching has been applied and the game will boot as usual.

Drop DLL and INI files from the package in the same folder where the game executable is.

Just boot the game as usual and you’re done, congratulations!

HOW TO INSTALL WITHOUT THE INSTALLER

If you are having difficulties to run the original installer from the game, here’s a better alternative procedure that will always work:

Open your CD-ROM of Biohazard / Resident Evil or mount a corresponding ISO with a virtual drive (CloneCD, Deamon Tools, and native Win10 virtual drive all work fine for this).

Create somewhere on your hard drive a folder that will contain the game’s data an executable.

Go back to your CD-ROM, enter folder “horr” and copy either “USA” or “JPN” to the folder you have created in step 2.

If you are performing this for Biohazard MediaKite reprints, also copy to your hard driver folder the file “BioHazard.exe”, otherwise copy the official European update executable “NEWEUR.EXE”.

Copy ddraw.dll and conf.ini in the same folder where your game executable is located.

Boot the game, you’re done.

FEATURES

Removes the need for Win95/98 compatibility mode to even boot, making the game compatible with Win7 and later. This collaterally fixes CPU0 100% spikes.

Fixes frame rate for good. You will get 30 fps in most 3D sections while 60-62 fps in the rest, like it’s intended to.

Effectively makes the game installation-portable (i.e. no need to install it) due to the removal of Registry operations (replaced with an INI configuration file).

Removes legacy joypad support and replaces it with XInput. This means that you can use an XBox 360/ONE pad and take advantage of all common buttons, including shoulder triggers.

Replaces DirectDraw emulation layer with DXGL.

Allows to boot the game without the need for a physical CD-ROM drive.

Allows the game to load videos from the installed directory, instead of always checking for data on CD-ROM.

Adds new windowed resolutions and removes buggy fullscreen ones. New resolutions are: 800×600 and 1024×768. You can cycle through them in game by pressing F7 and F8 (multiple presses may be required, the game is buggy as hell when it tries to manage F1-12 presses).

Enables screen smoothing in software mode. Change Filtering in conf.ini under [DXGL] to 1 for filtered and 0 for pixelated.

Fixes in-game timer when entering the Status screen.

Replaces the Windows MultiMedia video player (winmm.dll, module MCI) with a new one based on ffmpeg and fanplayer. This introduces a number of improvements, like filtered output, better internal control of what happens during playback, and the ability to play high quality mp4 files natively (supported codecs: h264 for video and AAC for audio). If you want to create your own improved videos, grab a copy of ffmpeg and use a command line similar to this for proper conversion:

It’s important that you use libx264 and aac as codecs because otherwise the player will just ignore the video and either reproduce it mute or with no output on screen. The other options are pretty much optional. After you have your mp4 file, create a “movie” folder is inside the game’s installation folder (or just copy the one from the patch archive) and name your video the same as the original that you want to replace with extension “.mp4”. So, if you have “pu.avi” name your file “pu.mp4”, place it inside folder movie, and the game will try to see if it’s there and play it.

KNOWN ISSUES

Hardware rendering cannot be initialized properly and will fail no matter what. This is caused by the incapability of DXGL to pass some texture tests performed by the game initializer. I will try and investigate exactly what is wrong with DXGL’s code or if it’s just the game testing absurd conditions.

Some people have experienced weird framerate bursts, sometimes caused by CPU spikes or by processes stealing CPU time. If you have these unusual spikes despite the DLL attempting to fix them, try opening conf.ini, search for line “Timer_mode”, and set its value to 1.

PLANNED FEATURES

An entirely redone option screen to allow for PC specific tweaks, like resolution change. The current one that only allows to remap keyboard and joypad buttons is too limited and kind of useless.

Restore support for hardware rendering and give it the ability to work in windowed mode and with higher resolutions.